The Irma Freeman Center for Imagination presents What We Carry, an exhibition featuring artwork by Penny Mateer and Dante Campudoni. The opening reception will be Friday, March 6, 2026, 6-9 pm. The exhibition closes April 3, 2026. Gallery Hours will be held every Wednesday 5-8 PM, Friday 12-7, and Saturday 2-5 PM.
What We Carry explores the emotional, political, and spiritual burdens that shape individual and collective identity. Through painting and textile, this exhibition brings together two distinct material languages to examine how memory, belief, trauma, and resistance are carried within bodies, homes, and histories.
“Damn Good Whacking” tapestry by Penny Mateer
Penny Mateer’s textile works transform domestic materials into sites of protest and critique, destabilizing the traditional associations of comfort, labor, and femininity. Her quilts operate as both banners and battlegrounds, embedding political urgency within the intimate structure of fabric. They ask how personal spaces become political spaces, and how inherited patterns—cultural, familial, systemic—are stitched into everyday life.
Painting by Dante Campudoni
Dante Campudoni’s paintings move inward, mapping psychological and spiritual terrains through color, gesture, and symbolic form. His work treats emotion as architecture and consciousness as a shifting landscape, suggesting that what we carry internally—desire, grief, faith, doubt—shapes how we move through the external world. Where Mateer’s textiles confront collective systems, Campudoni’s paintings confront the interior systems of the self.
Together, the works in What We Carry propose that the personal and political are inseparable. The exhibition traces how feeling becomes structure, how protest becomes domestic, and how the unseen burdens of the psyche echo within social frameworks. In juxtaposition, cloth and pigment become parallel languages—one stitched, one gestural—each revealing what is held, inherited, resisted, and transformed.
Ultimately, What We Carry asks viewers to consider not only what they bear, but how they bear it—and how carrying itself can become an act of survival, defiance, and meaning.
The opening of What We Carrywill be held in conjunction with Penn Avenue’s monthly art crawl, Unblurred First Friday on March 6th.